NY Times Rehashes ‘Valkyrie’ Story - Bloggers Squeal
Everyone’s got an opinion about how much trouble Tom Cruise’s latest project Valkyrie is in. Michael Cieply sums the whole thing up in the NY Times and gives United Artists chief executive Paula Wagner a chance to defend the film.
There’s no real news here, but the funny part is that, within minutes of the story hitting the feeds, David Poland fired off a defensive post (his Hot Blog was named in the piece as having declared Valkyrie dead) distancing himself from Roger Friedman and Defamer who were quoted in the same article.
Meanwhile, probably irritated he wasn’t also quoted in the article, Jeff Wells crossed his arms, yawned and reminded the world he’d already done a better job of summing up the situation weeks ago.
And bloggers wonder why they’re not taken seriously by the establishment.
Filed under: Miscellaneous
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I literally don’t understand a certain line in Poland’s article. Here it is:
***
There is one reason why, in spite of many people wanting me to go negative on the film, I finally wrote that “Valkyrie is dead.”
(italicized and emboldened emphasis mine)
***
Is there legitimately something I’m missing? Because if not, it reads like someone saying, “In spite of people wanting me to declare the Calgary Flames had no chance after the second period in San Jose tonight, I wrote that ‘the Flames are dead’.”
It’s weird.
Poland acts as though being a blogger is like being a Christian under the Romans before Constantine. Give me a break. “At least Cieply didn’t call be ‘a blogger’.” Heaven forbid.
One of the things that David Poland doesn’t realize is that, quite often, he’s badly in need of an editor. I’m pretty sure that what he means is, “In spite of many people wanting me to go negative on Valkyrie, I didn’t. But finally, I decided to write Valkyrie is dead.”
And the ‘blogger’ thing is his huge ego poking through, as the always-reliable-to-annoy-certain-people Joe Leydon noticed.
But he’s still better than Wells.
It’s amazing how much people want Tom Cruise to fail now, almost on a par with Michael Jackson a few years ago. Other than act like a freak did the guy commit any crimes against humanity? I can’t remember.
Days of Thunder came out a long time ago…you’d think people would have forgiven that by now.
Eh, well I really can’t blame Poland for wanting to distance himself from Roger Friedman.
Ooh, sorry, are there fans of Friedman around here?
Joel, I agree with you - people really do want Tom Cruise to fail. It’s awful.
Come on, most big stars/directors/etc. have made a bomb at one time or other in their lives. Is anyone still blaming Steven Spielberg for Hook? Apologies to anyone who’s a fan of that film, but I thought it sucked. And I was someone who loved most everything Spielberg did at that time.
The bottom line is when you’re in, you can do whatever you want and there are no consequences. Once you’re out, whether it’s because you become too much of a freak like Michael or some other reason, you’re out.
A slightly different slant on Polandnese (though it may be exactly what Jeff was saying) -> the fact that people wanted me to go negative on Valkyrie was cause to resist doing so, but faced with the facts I had no choice but to declare it dead.
“And I was someone who loved most everything Spielberg did at that time.”
That’s because you were still a child :-)
I wouldn’t blame Poland for wanting to distance himself from Defamer or Freidman if Cieply was really equating them. I guess it’s possible anyone reading the article would think Hot Blog was on the same level as those lowlifes…I don’t know.
It was only until I saw that Wells had rung in in typically Wellsian fashion that I even thought of remarking on it. The Wells/Poland Ego combo was too good to pass up, even if they weren’t aiming at each other.
I still think the February move is a non-story. Regardless of how United Artists spins it, I still think it means they have no faith in the movie, but film history is littered with great movies the studio had no faith in.
It may in fact stink, but I’m going to wait and see.
sartre: And even as a child, I knew that Hook sucked. :-)
Thanks for trying to clarify Poland’s statement, Jeff. And I enjoyed seeing Joe Leydon point out the obvious to Poland for the ten thousandth time.
I doubt there are any big Friedman fans here, Alison. I’m definitely not one of them if there are.
I often agree with Wells, Poland and Friedman respectively in their taste in films. Wells might be better than Poland in this regard on the whole, though a few years back I thought Poland was the overall better critic. Lately Poland has seemingly become lazier and lazier, and his brutal and demeaning dismissals of such notable and worthwhile efforts like Zodiac and The Assassination of Jesse James by the Coward Robert Ford really brought him down several notches for me in the past year.
Joel, I agree that the rabid hatred of Cruise is fairly tired. The great irony in my opinion is that he’s become a better actor in the last seven years or so, and it seems as though the better and more natural an actor and movie star he’s become, the less and less liked he is. But what do I know? I am quite cool towards many of his more “iconic” performances, which tended to be more “smirkingly boyish” to create a term out of thin air like our president.
Cruise’s off-screen behavior is admittedly kind of scary but I don’t really care about it much.
I hope that doesn’t make me a perpetual child, sartre. Them’s fighting words. ;-)
Hook is very flawed to be sure but it actually plays better now than when it was released because of two main reasons, the first being that it seems to play better for adults than many children, which can certainly be noted as a big failing on its part, and the second being that now one can appreciate it as something of both a (temporary) culmination of many of Spielberg’s themes leading to it (even the sometimes superficial film historian Ephraim Katz points to its expression of its creator’s struggling “duality”) and a springboard for many emerging from it (just one being a man stuck in a soulless profession attempting to find greater transcendent as greater spiritual truth based in oneiric conceptions rather than mere vaguely voluptuary impulses).
A lot of “failed” films by greats work this way; Hawks’s Land of the Pharoahs is better in the context of Rio Bravo, and just yesterday when viewing The Ladykillers again I realized it was much better and richer than I believed it to be, as a result of No Country for Old Men. My Blueberry Nights, which I plan on seeing later this week again anyway, will certainly follow this pattern as well. Darn, I even like the already well-regarded Damnation a great deal more than I used to because of Werckmeister Harmonies. It’s actually one of my favorite aspects of auteur studying.
My understanding of Valkyrie is that, perhaps they need the extra time (the mid-February release date) because they looked at the film, found it too talky, and decided to go back to the original conception of starting with a big battle. In any event, I wouldn’t trust “the blogging community” beyond Craig because he wisely self-edits what to write and what not to. I mean, they weren’t even right about how long the next Indiana Jones movie is and it’s coming out in a few weeks. Whatever they have to say about Valkyrie, especially at this juncture, is truly negligible.
And who knows? Maybe UA is going to redefine the way we think of February releases. The Silence of the Lambs came out in that normally dismal month. (What did the studio think of its film in that case? I’ve frequently wondered.)
The only reason for me to see Valkyrie is Carice van Houten, but I don’t think she has a very big role in it, so I’ll bide my time until Body of Lies and Dorothy Mills later this year.
Valkyrie strikes me as a Last Samurai-styled Tom Cruise heroic ego-trip. Tom Cruise is okay when working for directors who can play against that image (i.e. Collateral). When Cruise is working for a weaker director or is given producer credit… forget it.
Although I haven’t seen Days of Thunder since I was in middle school, I liked that movie. It doesn’t get any better than a red-headed Nicole Kidman (see also Dead Calm and Malice). She needs to have a few good meals and dye her hair back. I’ve never found the anorexic Barbie look attractive and never will (way off topic, I know).
Valkyrie also has Bill Nighy, Tom Wilkinson, Kenneth Branagh, Stephen Fry and Terrence Stamp. Not sure how big their parts are.
Clarice von Houten is beautiful and extremely talented.
I also like the younger, ostensibly more shapely redheaded Nicole Kidman. Though I’m still trying to wrap my head around the recent realization that I only like two of her films (To Die For and Eyes Wide Shut). Strange.
“I hope that doesn’t make me a perpetual child, sartre. Them’s fighting words. ;-)”
Spielberg fans (and scholars) are so easy to bait :-)
Heh, heh.
hijacks thread
Sartre, you should check out Chuck’s blog for an excellent review of a On Dangerous Ground, a unique 1952 noir made by Nicholas Ray. (You’ve probably seen it!)
de-hijacks thread
Let me just chime in as one of the potential Spielberg-baitees. Hook is awful, but it’s one of those exception-that-proves-the-rule things for me.
Any director of Speilberg’s heft has a Hook or two in their history, a movie with far too much money, star power, and passion behind it that just explodes on the screen and falls apart from the first frame to the last.
I can’t back you on Hook, Alexander, but if it says anything about Speilberg it’s that the mentality of the 80’s in Hollywood did not die quickly nor easily. Kinda reminds me of that quote from Coppola about making Apocalypse Now, “We had access to too much money, too much equipment, and little by little, we went insane.”
Hook is a thoroughly mediocre movie that suffers from very unfortunate casting (how I wish Kevin Kline had played Peter Pan and not the borderline insufferable Robin Williams), incomprehensibly imprudent editing (was Michael Kahn secretly on vacation when the film was supposed to be edited? 2-1/2 hours for this story is inexcusable) and the blandest, most inert visuals of any Spielberg film by far in my opinion (particularly Neverland, which he should have hammered out of the park). It was actually my first Spielberg film, at least theatrically, and even as a seven-year-old I realized it had quite a few patchy parts. Rufio won me over as my favorite Lost Boy because he had a good personality, and I distinctly still remember the theatre going dead silent when he was killed, with just about every kid stunned and saddened.
That Coppola quote, one of my favorites from any director, is a good one to use with regards to Hook.
That said, Hook has its charming vignettes (most of which involve Dustin Hoffman, who I think is solid in the titular role) and both expands and broadens Spielbergian concerns, and I’m ultimately glad Spielberg got it out of his system because for one thing it’s a good document of where he was as an artist and person, it being his nadir notwithstanding, and for another it seemed to be the trial by fire experience almost necessary for him to mature, and, like his Peter Pan, more emphatically “grow up.”
Damn Alexander, that’s exactly what I think of Hook, only with a more glass is half empty stressing. And Kevin Kline is a wonderful suggestion. I’ve been saying that someone needs to write an article about the ridiculous waste of career that has befallen both Kevin Kline and Steve Martin.
I second all of the talk about Kevin Kline. He’s an absolutely terrific actor, both on screen and on stage, and he does drama, comedy and musicals (including operetta). This is a man that can do anything.
I’m hit and miss on Kevin Kline. He’s been insufferable at times, but when he’s good, he’s great. He would’ve made a fine Peter Pan.
I used to adore Robin Williams and now I can hardly stand him…I mean even retroactively, it’s not just that he’s made a steady stream of crap, I don’t even like him in the things I used to like him in.
Kevin Kline had a small but fun roll in Definitely, Maybe, a movie I’m almost embarrassed to remind you I liked.
Thanks, Chuck. But don’t credit me with the idea of Kevin Kline playing Peter Pan; as usual, Spielberg’s casting instinct was dead-on. He wanted Kline, but there was a big scheduling conflict and Kline couldn’t do Hook, so Robin Williams got it. Ever since learning that, I often think, “For all sad words on tongue and pen, the saddest are these: what might have been.”
Wow, Alexander, excellent points all on Hook. I almost want to revisit it in a big Speilberg retro just to put it all into greater perspective. Almost, but not so much.
You’re right though that Hook’s greatest value is how it reflexively speaks to the artist behind it. Speilberg wears his heart on his sleeve in many of his movies. Close Encounters, ET, Hook, and AI all seem to capture snapshots of where he was creatively, emotionally, and psychologically at specific points in his career. They all share specific themes and inspirations and work or not to one extent or another. Curious.
When are you going to write your Speilberg bible, Alexander? I want to read it.
Alexander: Let’s be fair. It wasn’t the ten thousandth time. More like, oh, only the six or seven hundreth.
Happy to have you stop by Joe, even if it was only in self defense.
Aha, Joe, thank you for stopping by here. Usually people exaggerate things that are bad but I try to inflate the occurrence of good things from time to time. Poland needs you around for regular reality checks.
Joel, my Spielberg bible is, much like a certain book by a wine expert named Miles, due out in the fall.